Pirate Raid (2)
"Excellent choice."
And so she set off on her journey—converting her class from SS-grade combatant to SS-grade miner, ready to enjoy seventy straight hours of nonstop mining work.
Anyway, after turning our Ignis into a dual-wielding pickaxe warrior and shipping her out as a living mining machine, I called Jessica over and asked whether there was any way to wake the rest of the kids currently hibernating at the base.
Given that my account had been fully geared with an endgame set, the odds were high that most of those hibernating units were S-grade or above. If I could pull even one of them out of hibernation, that alone would be more than enough firepower—overflowing, even.
But...
"The supers and heroes currently in hibernation will wake on their own... after the base has been repaired and upgraded."
"...Really?"
"Yes. However, we have no way of knowing who will wake up."
"So no one decided the order they'd come out in?"
"Correct. And aside from the personnel obtained through base upgrades, the remaining hibernating units will randomly come out of hibernation whenever the Commander manipulates dimensional causality."
"..."
Just as Jessica explained, releasing them from hibernation was locked behind the game system. At this point, no matter what I did, I couldn't immediately use the characters I'd spent my own money raising. It was a perfect demonstration of why this damn game had earned its place among the most vicious trash games ever made.
But looking at it another way...
"Jessica, how much do the base repair and upgrade costs come to altogether?"
"Yes, sir! Approximately six hundred fifty minerals!"
At Jessica's snappy salute, I nodded and thought it over.
If we just hold out against this pirate raid, we upgrade the base and the hibernating personnel get added straight to the fleet... is that it?
Judging by Jessica's tone and the way the information was framed, it looked like at least two supers would pop out when hibernation lifted. Which probably meant something like: handle this with just the one hero you pulled from the gacha—if you can't even manage that, surviving from here on out is going to be rough.
Of course, stewing over this alone was clearly the worst of the worst plans. So I decided to thrash about using that sleek collective intelligence to dig up the information I needed.
Not long after I left that chat...
Through the flood of chat messages, I confirmed that both the information I'd obtained and the conclusions I'd drawn were solid. And after continuing to think about what I needed to do right now, it hit me: improve my ship control skills in preparation for the coming pirate raid.
So I closed the chat window already filling back up with nonsense, called Jessica over, and ordered her to install a separate console so I could personally operate the patrol ship.
Pirate Raid (2)
The plan obtained through the chat window's collective intelligence went as follows.
Load Ignis into an assault pod and have her charge one of the pirate ships. While I use extreme micro-control of the patrol ship to buy time against the remaining pirate vessels, our Ignis sweeps through the interior of her target, comes out, and leaps into another pirate ship. Then the last one gets taken out by the patrol ship I'm piloting and the base's defense turrets.
Honestly, the most critical point of this plan was none other than my piloting skill controlling the decoy patrol ship. But here we ran into one small, minor problem.
And that was this: the patrol ship I was piloting was, unlike in the original game, much larger than expected—and much faster than expected. And my actual ability to control the thing was... not great.
Especially when it came to "control," the problem was a bit serious.
— Kuuung!
"Commander, if things keep going like this, before we even face the pirates..."
"Just a moment."
— Kung!
"Commander?"
"The fatigue drain is more severe than I expected."
"Commander."
"Hmm."
Watching Jessica's tone grow cold enough to evoke a tuna sitting in a deep freezer as she observed my sorry state made the situation perfectly clear. In my previous life(?), moving a patrol ship or fleet was just a matter of click-click with keyboard and mouse, or tap-tap on a phone. But here, I suddenly had to directly control an RTS unit in third person.
In my previous life, the only vehicle license I had was a Class 2 automatic—and even that was a closet license I'd barely scraped together. So of course disaster struck when I suddenly tried to pilot a ship in real-time third-person view.
Those thudding sounds were all from the patrol ship I was operating scraping something, or lightly colliding—denting the base armor plating and docking facilities it hit, crushing part of the external hangar in a full-blown catastrophe. Faced with Jessica's icy stare, I could only avoid her gaze, not knowing what to say.
But I couldn't just skip this training entirely either. So, enduring Jessica's freezing glare, I redoubled my efforts to somehow improve my patrol ship control skills over the remaining time.
Meanwhile, at the same moment.
At the very instant the protagonist was playing bumper cars with the patrol ship and accidentally crushing part of the hangar, the pirate ships approaching the star system where Jessica and the protagonist lived their cozy little life were packed full of pirates buzzing with excitement over the long-awaited prey they'd finally found.
"Boys! Y'all ready to make a killing this time too?!"
"Ossu!"
The unmanned bases that had been springing up like mushrooms all over space recently—these pirates had made their living mainly raiding those. And belonging to some massive pirate organization, they were planning to hang up their pirate hats for a while after this raid.
"After this plunder... I've decided to propose to that girl at the brothel."
"This son of a bitch dares?"
"You bastard, get off this ship right now!"
"This guy dares plant a death flag right in front of us!"
"Ah."
Of course, the reason wasn't purely wanting to quit work as just mentioned.
"Looking at these guys, they seem like ones the major powers scattered out to explore space in advance."
"I've been hearing that some of the bases that were on standby have started activating recently."
The pirates themselves didn't realize it yet. But as players streaming in from Earth began logging in one by one, they'd come to understand that the "bases" they'd been able to easily gobble up until now were no longer even feasible to plunder.
Even before coming here, they'd discovered another base and tried to "requisition supplies," only to be chased off in humiliation by a defense fleet more than twice the size of their pirate band.
One last time. Really just one last score, then head back to their territory and live it up coasting for a while.
But with that intention, finding a place matching the pirate band's self-set policy—namely, "places with weaker fleets than ours but lots of resources to plunder"—was truly not easy. Considering the pirate band's strength was only three patrol ships to begin with, it was an absurd policy from the start...
Ah, but before there was plenty to eat even with this policy.
Buried in that experience, the pirate band no longer had the intelligence left to find another path. So whenever there were resources worth plundering, the place either had at least twice their firepower growling at them—or, conversely, bases so broke even they had nothing worth taking.
In various ways: bust, bust, bust. Just more busts, pouring all their energy into wasting time fruitlessly...
Then one day, the base they'd coincidentally discovered now was showing a completely different growth pattern from all the other bases they'd passed by.
"Defense ships: just one, and it's a patrol ship... and the rest are all resource mining ships?"
"That's what I'm saying, Boss?!"
Even a destroyer—if they had just one, it'd be a decent fight. But pulling only a single patrol ship the same as theirs and just hoarding resources...
"Boys, isn't this basically them begging us to come eat them?"